The world's biggest bank just bought a 'secret' gold vault in London

Sonja
Enz of the Stapferhaus, an event place for contemporary
exhibitions, holds coins in her hands as she sits in a room
filled with 4 million Swiss 5-cent coins during a media preview
of the exhibition "Geld — Jenseits von Gut und Boese" ("Money —
Beyond Good and Evil") in Lenzburg, Switzerland, on November 14,
2014.Reuters/Arnd
Wiegmann

The world's biggest bank by assets just
bought a secret gold vault in London.

China's ICBC Standard Bank agreed to buy one of Europe's
largest gold vaults from Barclays,
according to Bloomberg.

The deal is expected to be completed in July, although no
additional financial details were given.

The vault is in a "secret" location
and can hold up to 2,000 metric tons of gold, silver, platinum,
and palladium. It was opened by Barclays in 2012.

The BBC
reports that ICBC Standard Bank's head of commodities, Mark
Buncombe, said that buying the vault "enables us to better
execute on our strategy to become one of the largest Chinese
banks in the precious metals market."

Notably, China's appetite for gold seems to have grown over the
last few months.

In April, the country launched a gold-price benchmark in order to
have greater influence over the price of the commodity,
according to the Financial Times. This could eventually
reduce the influence of the London gold price, wrote the
FT's Henry Sanderson.

"Although they still only account for a very small proportion of
the 1,974t held in these products globally, Chinese gold-backed
ETFs on aggregate attracted 11.1t of inflows during the first
quarter, more than doubling their holdings in the process,"
according to the WGC.

It added:

Huaan Yifu Gold ETF surpassed all other funds in Asia: total
holdings at quarter-end were 13.5t, up 10.3t from the end of
2015. Although institutional investors were reportedly the
driving force behind this flood of inflows, retail investors were
also a considerable contributor, looking to gold for
diversification and wealth protection.